The Fence (5 page)

Eric glances up and smiles. ‘Look who found me,' he says, delighted at the invasion and unaware of the crime committed. ‘Aren't they handsome?' He ruffles the golden dog's ears. She opens one eye and licks his hand.

‘She is not cute. She, Butter, has just defecated all over my lawn.' Gwen huffs, reaching for the trowel where it hangs on the masonite board.

She swears Eric smirks but when she peers more closely at him his attention is absorbed by his sanding. ‘Take the dogs back to their owners, Eric. I don't want them here. You should see the mess they've made and the children have already begun ruining Babs' garden.'

‘It's their garden now, Gwennie,' Eric murmurs.

Tears spring to Gwen's eyes and she wipes them away. ‘They're planning to level it.'

‘Level what?'

‘The garden. They don't like the garden.'

Eric looks up. ‘Why not?'

‘Because you can't eat it. She, Francesca, first says she's no gardener and the next minute starts going on about sustainability. They plan to get rid of everything. Don't they appreciate how many years, decades, it took me to create that blasted garden? They can't just flatten it.'

‘They bought the garden as well as the house, Gwennie. They can do what they like.'

‘No, they can't.' Gwen bangs the trowel against the side of the workbench, startling the dogs who spring to their feet and bark.

‘Oh shut up, you stupid mutts. You know what they're called, don't you?' her voice rising with indignation. ‘Peanut and Butter. How stupid is that? And the children? The twins are Amber and Silver and then there's Marigold and the baby.' She tsked, ‘I heard him say it as he went up the stairs. Oh yes, that's right Bijoux. What sort of names are those?'

‘Well, Marigold is obviously the name of a flower. Bijoux literally means jewel.'

Gwen stares at him. ‘How on earth do you know that?'

Eric shrugs. ‘Amber is called a gemstone although really it's fossilised resin. Silver is self-explanatory.'

Gwen collapses onto the work stool, which signals to the dogs to come over and nudge her legs. ‘Go away, you stupid mutts,' she says, pushing them away with her knee as they lick her, wagging their tails.

‘They picked half the flowers in the garden. Between these dogs and those children, I don't think we're in for a very good time with these new people.'

‘Early days, Gwennie. Early days. Give them a chance to settle in. I'm sure they'll redeem themselves in time.'

‘I hope so.'

Eric's right, she does have a tendency to get bent out of shape over things she can't control. Perhaps she should give these new neighbours the benefit of the doubt.

Eric struggles to his feet, stiff from sitting too long in one position. ‘How about a cup of tea? That'll put things right.' As he climbs the stairs, he turns and asks, ‘Have we any of that caramel slice left over from Michael and Soo-Lin's visit?'

Gwen sighs and stands. ‘Of course not. That was months ago, Eric.' She goes into the yard with her trowel, the dogs ­trotting at her heels.

Frankie's June

Frankie stares out the car window, blocking out the noise of the twins squabbling over their tablets as they try to keep them away from Marigold's sticky fingers. Baby Bijoux sleeps through it all.

Brandon has a John Butler Trio CD playing on low in an effort to bring the kids down a notch or two. God, it will be good when they have a proper yard to run around in and burn off this relentless energy, she thinks.

Part of her wants to put her hand on his thigh, an act of reassurance, but she dares not. Throughout the morning, as the removalists heaved furniture into the van, Brandon's mood darkened. So much so that she had been grateful she'd promised the children she'd take them to the park. When the removalists left, Brandon came to fetch them, which he needn't have done as she saw the truck rumbling along Johnston Street on its way to the leafy north shore.

The other part of Frankie resents Brandon's sour mood. Neither of them wants to leave Annandale with its cafes and bars an easy stroll from the house, the children's future school within safe walking distance, not to mention the suburb's proximity to the city. They are leaving their lifestyle behind. After the twins were born, the Annandale terrace had been Brandon's pick. As the stay-at-home parent, its renovation had been his major project, in-between looking after the kids and screwing the barista.

At least it wasn't the nanny. Those people uncomfortable that she chose work over staying at home with her children could never resist the joke about trusting Brandon around the nanny. She laughed along, recognising the price of being different. That TV comedy about stay-at-home dads makes everyone a comic but, at Klaussman & Sons, Frankie and Brandon's living arrangements are unique. Staff share a morbid fascination with her personal life more than the other account directors'. Because she's the only woman? It's a depressing thought in this day and age.

Like any woman, she endured nine months of pregnancy and gave birth naturally, despite the snide inferences that Frankie Desmarchelliers was definitely too posh to push. She breastfed all her children and continued to do so on returning to work, alleviating herself in the disabled toilet on level four, the only place clean and private enough in which to do so.

Although she did all this, in this new millennium it seems it is still frowned upon for a mother to return to work after a mere three months maternity leave and still considered somewhat unusual to leave her children in the care of their father. Somehow people hold two points of view in perfect balance. One, that there must be something wrong with Francesca that she can sacrifice raising her children for the sake of pursuing her career, and two, that Brandon is some sort of domestic saint forgoing his career to nurture his offspring.

Frankie turns and checks on the children now. Bijoux sleeps on and the twins and Goldie have reached a truce, sharing their headphones, their eyes glued to the flickering images on their tablets.

She loves her children as much as any mother but the truth is she just can't stay at home with them full-time. It's not the amount of energy and time they suck up. The majority of which is spent feeding them, cleaning up after them and ferrying them around to play dates and activities with just the occasional reward of them not whingeing about being bored or not getting their own way. She should know, her mother basically anointed her as the surrogate mother to her five younger siblings. Frankie has already raised one family. She simply couldn't do it again. Whereas Brandon is a qualified infants teacher. Entertaining children with the attention span of gnats is second nature. He has filled their house with crates stuffed with pipe-cleaners, stickers and sheets of coloured paper, boxes of crayons, pencils, textas, and rolls and rolls of butcher's paper.

What's so wrong with choosing work over that? Each day she arrives and her desk is the way she left it. She eats lunch uninter­rupted, has adult conversations and staff to do her bidding, not to mention that it pays well. Her money bought their first apartment, paid the mortgage on Johnston Street and will continue to do so on 18 Green Valley Avenue. Her hard-earned cash puts food on the table and clothes on everybody's back, keeps the lights on and the hot water running. The groceries are delivered on a Friday, the cleaner comes on Tuesdays and Frankie always steps carefully around Brandon's ego.

For some reason it is acceptable to call a woman who stays at home a housewife but the same term cannot be applied to a man. The rare times they socialise, Frankie hears this in Brandon's replies to the question, ‘So what do you do for a crust, mate?' The answer is never ‘I am a house husband' or even ‘I am the primary caregiver to our four children'. Brandon says he is taking time out to renovate the house. Once she heard him cite he was recovering from a back injury earned at soccer. Frankie cannot recall Brandon ever playing soccer or having a back injury. His palpable lie beds in her chest.

So when Brandon asked if they could have a nanny two days a week so that he might do some casual teaching and generally have some ‘me time', Frankie acquiesced. The nanny shared the workload – swimming lessons, toddler gymnastics, Silver's speech therapy and play dates with their friends. Frankie cannot deny there were real benefits to having a nanny. For starters, she arrived home to a house bathed in serenity. The nanny cooked for the children and that meant there were always leftovers for her and Brandon to share – as long as she didn't mind a rotation of organic chicken sausages and variations on mince. The nanny washed the children's clothes, hung their swimmers and towels out to dry, packed the toys away, blu-tacked their daily output of artwork to the kitchen cupboards and had photos of their days marching across the fridge. There was a star chart recording their compliant behaviour (although it seemed to Frankie that it was a bit of a stretch to imagine how either Silver or Amber achieved a star for setting the table but who was she to argue?). There was a stoplight with stickers on it for bad behaviour, though fortunately none of the kids had gone beyond orange. Having a nanny was as close as Frankie was ever going to get to having a wife.

From a cost-benefit perspective, she justified the expense on the basis that Brandon's income from casual teaching would offset the cost of hiring a nanny two days a week because Frankie was only a senior account manager at Klaussman & Sons at the time, not yet head of the whole shebang. At first the arrangement worked well. Brandon picked up two days a week teaching without any problems, but over time two days often ended up being one because Brandon didn't like working at the schools in the rougher neighbourhoods. Sometimes it seemed there was no work at all, especially as Brandon didn't feel qualified to teach kids beyond Stage One.

‘Casual teachers are just glorified babysitters, Brandy. When I was at school, they mostly chucked on a movie or took us outside for a game of poison ball,' she'd argued.

Brandon, who was potty-training Marigold at the time, a job he was welcome to as far as Frankie was concerned, replied that he was not that kind of teacher.

‘But it can't be that much harder babysitting Year Three kids over Year One kids,' she said, holding her breath against the smell.

‘Primary teaching is a completely different skill set,' he said, wiping Marigold's bottom.

Marigold beamed at her. ‘Look, Mummy, poo!'

Frankie clapped her hands. ‘Clever girl, Goldie. And in the potty too!'

Avoiding the developing argument, Frankie left Brandon to supervise handwashing. In reality, Brandon's one day of teaching covered enough of the cost of the nanny and Frankie so liked having a wife as well as a husband that she let it slip. Everyone was benefiting.

Until that fateful day, she thinks, as they drive over the Gladesville Bridge, past the mansions and yachts, when Frankie had a toothache and went to the dentist. One injection hadn't dulled the pain, so the dentist had given her a second which left her mouth numb to the point she was incoherent. Frankie had called her PA, managing to convey that she had to cancel her afternoon meetings because she sounded like she'd had a particularly long and well-greased client lunch. She even caught a cab home, which she rarely did, and arrived to find Brandon putting his ‘me time' to good use by banging the Brazilian barista from the coffee shop around the corner.

Frankie squeezes her eyes shut against the horrible image rising up before her. Her pulse hammers in her temple every time she thinks of it and, right this second, her urge is not to place a hand on Brandon's thigh but to slap him and shout ‘Why?'

At the door of their bedroom, she saw the wet footprints tracking from the ensuite spa towards their marital bed. There, on the thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets, was Brandon kneeling at the foot of the bed, his head buried between the thighs of a woman arching her back and oohing in ecstasy. Frankie noticed two other things about her. That she had no pubic hair and that there was make-up smeared over the sateen sheets. The baby monitor winked on the bedside table.

Stunned, Frankie stepped back into the hallway and listened in horror as they finished in shrieking, arse-slapping rapture. When Brandon sauntered, sated and flaccid, to the toilet, he stopped when he saw her reflection in the wardrobe mirror. He glanced at the bed, as did Frankie, to see the barista checking for messages on her phone with one hand whilst searching the bottom drawer of Frankie's bedside table for her secret stash of salted caramel Lindt balls with the other.

Frankie withdrew to the twins' room, who mercifully were at ballet lessons with the nanny and not there to witness their father's betrayal. She collapsed on Amber's bed, hugging Waddles the penguin to her chest. Her whole body flooded with heat, blood pounding in her ears. How long, how long had this woman been in her bed? An awful thought slapped her in the face. Whilst she was at work imagining the twins learning first position, wishing she could be there to see them stick out their bellies and point their satin toes, Brandon was with this woman. Not thinking of his children at all. He had undone everything. How could she continue to work five days a week when Brandon was clearly no longer a fit parent?

During the three hellish months of their separation, Frankie took the children to lunch at her mother's and made the mistake of sharing her feelings.

‘Even with two nannies on permanent rotation and the cleaner in twice a week, I'm exhausted.'

‘Cut back your hours,' said Noelle as she placed a platter arrayed with an elegant spiral of fruit in front of the children.

Frankie almost slammed down the Royal Doulton teacup. ‘I can't afford to, Mother. I have a mortgage, bills to pay; the money has to come from somewhere.'

Noelle sniffed and shot Frankie a glance. ‘You made your choice, Francesca.'

There was so much Frankie wanted to say. Noelle had given up work the day she married Frankie's father, Bernard, so she could maintain a harmonious home for her barrister husband, and everybody else, including her six children, had come a firm second. How much that hurt, still hurt, burning Frankie up with resentment that she, only a child herself, was left to organise her younger siblings so they did not interfere with her mother's priorities. For Noelle would never be the dog that bit the hand that fed her, even if she, as the dog in this scenario, was a very pampered poodle.

‘I don't have a wealthy husband to keep me,' Frankie said, although why, she didn't really know. She despised her mother's lifestyle and as a teenager had been determined to model her future on her father's life. But she had not been smart enough to get the marks needed to follow her father into law at Sydney University. She had studied Commerce at the University of NSW, a place her father, to this day, insisted on calling Kenso Tech, a nickname from its days as a science and technology college in the suburb of Kensington. She had worked so very hard not to be her mother and to gain her father's approval. For what?

‘I don't know why I came here today,' she blurted out.

Her mother placed butter biscuits on a tray and pushed them in front of the children. When Francesca took one, she pursed her lips. Another of Francesca's failings. She didn't inherit Noelle's fine bones. She, of all the children, inherited her father's figure, a beamy ship to burrow its prow through the waters of life.

‘Because you are lonely and tired and wondering whether you have made the right decision.' Noelle sat to the left of the head chair of the dining table. She would never dream of sitting in her husband's chair, even when he was not there.

‘You have chosen to focus on your career, neglected your husband and children and now here you are.' She dismissed Frankie's life with a flick of the wrist. ‘Why have children if you don't want them?'

Frankie slapped her hand on the table. ‘I love my children but I have to use my brain as well, otherwise I'll –' she was about to say ‘become a narcissist like you' but modified it to say, ‘go mad.'

Noelle snorted. ‘You were determined to marry a man who was nothing like your dear father and now you are complaining that he doesn't work, doesn't provide and has failed as both a husband and a father.'

The words stung. It was true that one of the reasons she was attracted to Brandon was that he was the exact opposite of her father. Brandon didn't want a career that made him absent from his children's formative years. She'd loved that about him. It's just that it would be easier if he wasn't so hopeless at all the other stuff – the cleaning, shopping, running errands stuff, the tedious stuff wives do. And she had no intention of being her mother, with all the home help money could buy, so bored she ironed pillowcases and tea towels.

‘Hasn't feminism taught you anything?' Her mother sighed, crossing her long legs and tapping a manicured nail against her teacup.

Francesca drank her coffee in a single draught, hoping for a caffeine hit significant enough to combat the wave of exhaustion threatening to overwhelm her. Unable to muster a suitable reply to such an outrageously hypocritical question from her mother, she said nothing at all.